Automated Trust Negotiation in Autonomic Environments

摘要

Autonomic computing environments rely on devices that are able to make intelligent decisions without human supervision. Automated Trust Negotiation supports the cooperation of devices with no prior trust relationship. They can reach an agreement by iteratively exchanging credentials during a negotiation process. These credentials can serve as authorization tokens or may carry information that becomes a parameter of the further service usage. A careful negotiation strategy helps in protecting sensitive credentials that must only be available to authorized entities. We introduce the Versa Trust framework that supports a stateless negotiation protocol to reach comprehensive agreements. We argue how this approach applies to autonomic environments and demonstrate its scalability.